I guess licensing wasn't an issue when they published screens like this?
It would have been, but they would have sought permission from the various rights holders.
His tweet is just from Lesson 1 of the Albert Penello School of Spin. Say something factual and true but ignore the fact that your statement is a solvable solution with just a bit of effort.
It is true they'd have licencing issues, but all they'd need to do would be to get the people to say yeah sure give us free advertising in your UI video, or given that they're in control of the bloody thing remove the offending tiles with placeholder/mock-up content.
Notice how when he responded to the question of if the UI will be that fast and fluid he never once said a word meaning 'yes' - nor mentioned the words the question contained.
Instead he used different words that give the impression he is talking about what you are talking about.
He said the transition times and animations are all how the will be on the real dash - so the narration in the top left will show each word with that exact timing and it will fade out in that exact same way, but that is not to say that actually it will stall for few seconds before or after animations and transitions.
I'm not suggesting it won't be that fast, rather that the reason people don't believe a single word he says is because he has no idea how to speak in a normal way outside of PR mode when engaging regular people. Look at Shu's feed for example, it is full of simple yes/no responses.